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Writer's pictureHelder Barroso

Sleep Pressure & Caffeine

Our 24 hour circadian rhythm is the first of the two factors determining wake and sleep.


The second is sleep pressure. At this very moment, a chemical called adenosine is building up in your brain. It will continue to increase in concentration with every waking minute that elapses. The longer you are awake, the more adenosine will accumulate.


Think of adenosine as a chemical barometer that continuously registers the amount of elapsed time since you woke up this morning.


One consequence of increasing adenosine in the brain is an increasing desire to sleep. This is known as sleep pressure, and it is the second force that will determine when you feel sleepy, and thus should go to bed.


Using a clever dual-action effect, high concentrations of adenosine simultaneously turn down the “volume” of wake-promoting regions in the brain and turn up the dial on sleep-inducing regions.


As a result of that chemical sleep pressure, when adenosine concentrations peak, an irresistible urge for slumber will take hold. It happens to most people after twelve to sixteen hours of being awake.


You can, however, artificially mute the sleep signal of adenosine by using a chemical that makes you feel more alert and awake: caffeine.


Caffeine is not a food supplement. Rather, caffeine is the most widely used (and abused) psychoactive stimulant in the world. It is the second most traded commodity on the planet, after oil.


Consumption of caffeine represents one of the longest and largest unsupervised drug studies ever conducted on the human race, perhaps rivaled only by alcohol, and it continues to this day.


Caffeine works by successfully battling with adenosine for the privilege of latching on to adenosine welcome sites, or receptors in the brain. Once caffeine occupies these receptors, however, it does not stimulate them like adenosine, making you sleepy. Rather, caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent.


It’s the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears to shut out a sound. By hijacking and occupying these receptors, caffeine blocks the sleepiness signal normally communicated to the brain by adenosine.


The upshot: caffeine tricks you into feeling alert and awake, despite the high levels of adenosine that would otherwise seduce you into sleep.


Levels of circulating caffeine peak approximately thirty minutes after oral administration. What is problematic, though, is the persistence of caffeine in your system.


Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Let’s say that you have a cup of coffee after your evening dinner, around 7:30 p.m. This means that by 1:30 a.m., 50 percent of that caffeine may still be active and circulating throughout your brain tissue. In other words, by 1:30 a.m., you’re only halfway to completing the job of cleansing your brain of the caffeine you drank after dinner.


There’s nothing benign about that 50 percent mark, either. Half a shot of caffeine is still plenty powerful, and much more decomposition work lies ahead throughout the night before caffeine disappears.


Sleep will not come easily or be smooth throughout the night as your brain continues its battle against the opposing force of caffeine. Most people do not realize how long it takes to overcome a single dose of caffeine, and therefore fail to make the link between the bad night of sleep we wake from in the morning and the cup of coffee we had ten hours earlier with dinner.

Caffeine, which is not only prevalent in coffee, certain teas, and many energy drinks, but also foods such as dark chocolate and ice cream, as well as drugs such as weight-loss pills and pain relievers, is one of the most common culprits that keep people from falling asleep easily and sleeping soundly thereafter, typically masquerading as insomnia, an actual medical condition.

Also be aware that de-caffeinated does not mean non-caffeinated. One cup of decaf usually contains 15 to 30 percent of the dose of a regular cup of coffee, which is far from caffeine-free. Should you drink three to four cups of decaf in the evening, it is just as damaging to your sleep as one regular cup of coffee.


The “jolt” of caffeine does wear off. Caffeine is removed from your system by an enzyme within your liver, which gradually degrades it over time. Based in large part on genetics, some people have a more efficient version of the enzyme that degrades caffeine, allowing the liver to rapidly clear it from the bloodstream.


These rare individuals can drink an espresso with dinner and fall fast asleep at midnight without a problem. Others, however, have a slower-acting version of the enzyme. It takes far longer for their system to eliminate the same amount of caffeine.

One cup of tea or coffee in the morning will last much of the day, and should they have a second cup, even early in the afternoon, they will find it difficult to fall asleep in the evening.


Aging also alters the speed of caffeine clearance: the older we are, the longer it takes our brain and body to remove caffeine, and thus the more sensitive we become in later life to caffeine’s sleep-disrupting influence.


If you are trying to stay awake late into the night by drinking coffee, you should be prepared for a nasty consequence when your liver successfully evicts the caffeine from your system: a phenomenon commonly known as a “caffeine crash.”

Like the batteries running down on a toy robot, your energy levels plummet rapidly. You find it difficult to function and concentrate, with a strong sense of sleepiness once again.


We now understand why. For the entire time that caffeine is in your system, the sleepiness chemical it blocks (adenosine) nevertheless continues to build up. Your brain is not aware of this rising tide of sleep-encouraging adenosine, however, because the wall of caffeine you’ve created is holding it back from your perception. But once your liver dismantles that barricade of caffeine, you feel a vicious backlash: you are hit with the sleepiness you had experienced two or three hours ago before you drank that cup coffee plus all the extra adenosine that has accumulated in the hours in between, impatiently waiting for caffeine to leave.


One of the key things is to keep caffeine intake to before midday.



Coach HB

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